Intel® Software Network

Hi Jose,

There is a very interesting book: "Patterns for Paralllel Programming" covering many design patterns on parallel programming, by Timothy G. Mattson, Beverly A. Sanders and Berna L. Massingill.

Besides, you can find many interesting algorithms covered in Dr. Clay Breshears' "The Art of Concurrency: A Thread Monkey's Guide to Writing Parallel Applications". A must read.

As another example, in my book "C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming: Beginner's Guide", focused on C# parallel programming for beginners and talking about selected threading topics (not a full reference guide), I've used the factory method class creational pattern to create classes prepared for inheritance and hence simplifying the creation of parallelized code. Besides, another useful pattern whilst working in C# and C# 3.0 threading model is the observer object behavioral design pattern, also known as dependents and publish-subscribe. That's from my experience.

However, now that C# 4.0, .Net 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 is in Beta 1, the new light-weight threading model allows to use many other patterns that were very difficult to use in previoous C# and .Net versions.

Cheers,

Gaston

Hi Jose,

(1)
I don't know another references on the web.

(2)
I've explained how to create producer-consumer patterns using the new concurrent collections in my aforementioned book. With VS2010 and .NET 4.0, it will be easier to use the concurrent collections to work with pipelines and producers-consumers. You won't have to worry about locks as they are lock-free concurrent collections.

I'll be working on books and on posts about these topics. I'm waiting for VS 2010 Beta 2. :)

Best regards,

Gaston

Hi Jose,

Thanks for the link. Very interesting information.

Just a small issue: Most parallel patterns are designed to take advantage of old parallel architectures. With new NUMA hardware, some patterns have to be redesigned taking into account the new constraints and benefits.

However, this is something new and there's a lot of people working on new ideas for the new architectures. I'm one of them. I'll be posting my ideas on ISN.

Feel free to contact me. I'm very interested on patterns for parallel programming.

Best regards,

Gaston

Hi Jose (and everyone),

Another interesting source on work towards parallel design patterns is being done at the ParLab at the University of California Berkeley.  The Lab under the leadership of  Kurt Keutzer & Dave Patterson is funded by Intel and Microsoft. 

Lab URL - http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/
Link to Lab wiki on Pattern Language for Parallel Programming  - http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/wiki/patterns/patterns

Hi Jose and Paul,

Thanks for the link. All of them are really interesting.

Let me add a new one. Today, Michael McCool (Intel, co-founder of RapidMind) added a blog post on ISN talking about... patterns for parallel programming!

This is the link to his post: http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/10/08/on-platforms-patterns-and-parallelism/

It is also worth taking a look at his series Structured Patterns: A Basis for a High-Level Parallel Programming Standard

Great post and great information. :)

Cheers,

Gaston

I think the new perspective on design patterns are not only object-oriented ones. Patterns are accumulated in every aspect of software development. Posts on the RapidMind blogs are very interesting and mind-broadening anyway.